Entering Nillion, exploring its specific operational logic and excellent ecological performance, to investigate the future development prospects of the project and the blind computing track.
Written by: Deep Tide TechFlow
On March 20, 2025, the decentralized blind computing network Nillion announced the $NIL token economic model, signaling the countdown phase for TGE and the mainnet launch.
In the first quarter of 2025, there are many top-tier projects for TGE, but Nillion's TGE has sparked considerable discussion.
On one hand, former Uber founding engineer Conrad Whelan has entered Web3, and Nillion can be regarded as a star project in the privacy + data + AI track: in December 2022, it completed a $20 million seed round financing with a valuation of $180 million, led by Distributed Global; in October 2024, Nillion completed a new round of $25 million financing, led by Hack VC, with total financing exceeding $50 million.
On the other hand, before TGE, Nillion fell into a vortex of early disclosure of the airdrop plan and the lack of rewards for early supporters. In the face of controversy, Nillion quickly launched a series of countermeasures, including CMO Charlie Rogers publishing an article to address community concerns and launching a new version of the airdrop query tool, demonstrating strong problem-solving capabilities and a determination to ensure that rewards truly belong to long-term supporters, thus reversing the situation and receiving a lot of praise.
Privacy is a fundamental human right.
In the Web2 space, whether it is the frequent harassment calls/texts/emails received, or the identity information, facial recognition, shopping records, etc., that are sold indiscriminately in related Telegram bots or groups, the issue of privacy leakage has clearly reached a critical point.
For this reason, the Web3 privacy track, which aims to break through with the power of decentralization, has always attracted attention.
As a decentralized "blind computing" network, what makes Nillion special?
With the launch of TGE and the official launch of the mainnet, will Nillion, welcoming a new stage of development, lead the innovation paradigm in the privacy track?
This article aims to delve into Nillion, exploring its specific operational logic and excellent ecological performance, to investigate the future development prospects of the project and the blind computing track.
Image source: Twitter @nillionnetwork
Making rules transparent and ensuring community peace of mind: Nillion's airdrop will launch on March 24 alongside TGE
In the crypto world, whether an airdrop can proceed smoothly carries a certain "if it fails, it becomes a martyr" implication for the project:
If the airdrop standards are unclear and witches run rampant, the ecosystem will be in chaos, and the project will bear immense public pressure;
If the airdrop rules are transparent and rewards are truly distributed according to contributions, it can not only unite a strong community but also lay a solid foundation for the effective circulation of the project's ecological economic system and long-term development.
Image source: Nillion website
Unfortunately, Nillion's airdrop efforts encountered an unexpected twist at the outset: on March 8, a leaked Nillion airdrop plan circulated widely in the community, and what further dissatisfied the community was that many early supporters of Nillion found themselves excluded from this airdrop list.
As negative emotions began to brew, Nillion quickly noticed the issue and took a series of actions:
On one hand, Nillion CMO Charlie Rogers provided a detailed explanation of the airdrop rules, specifically addressing the reward groups, standard definitions, and witch prevention, promptly answering community questions about the airdrop.
On the other hand, Nillion quickly launched an updated version of the airdrop allocation checker, allowing community members to visit the page and connect their wallets to view specific airdrop results, including information such as badges and airdrop levels. Eligible members will receive a customized card:
GOLD level: 1,000 - 3,000 tokens
DIAMOND level: 3,000+ tokens
Image source: Nillion Airdrop Allocation Checker
At the same time, Nillion also canceled the originally planned 90-day pre-staking lock-up period, allowing all pre-staking rewards to be unlocked on the first day, demonstrating Nillion's commitment to rewarding the community.
In response to community sentiment, Nillion's decisive and effective handling not only showed the community the project's ample preparation for the airdrop work, but through the clear airdrop rules introduced in CMO Charlie Rogers' article, we also felt the project's full respect for ecological participants.
Specifically, Nillion's airdrop audience mainly includes the following three major groups, covering both technical and non-technical contributors:
For each group, Nillion has also announced specific standards aimed at accurately identifying long-term participants and true contributors in the ecosystem, ensuring that rewards truly go to members who create positive value for the project.
- Community value
Image source: Translated from Nillion CMO's long article "The Nillion Airdrop: Setting a New Standard"
- Developers and open-source contributors
Image source: Translated from Nillion CMO's long article "The Nillion Airdrop: Setting a New Standard"
- Participants in the validator program
Image source: Translated from Nillion CMO's long article "The Nillion Airdrop: Setting a New Standard"
In the current context where airdrops are becoming industrialized and witch issues are rampant, Nillion has also introduced corresponding standards aimed at resisting those who attempt to simplify the mining process with one-click node services, filtering out pure "wool party" participants. According to the currently published information, two types of project participants will be excluded from the airdrop:
Low-participation Secret submitters: only submitted 4 Secrets; did not stake any ETH; have no Discord roles (including reward roles); do not hold Nill Pill NFT.
Low-participation later validators: joined the validator program after September 14, 2024; did not stake any ETH; have no Discord roles (including reward roles); do not hold Nill Pill NFT.
Although some professional "wool party" members on social media have raised doubts, arguing that one-click node services can also be seen as a form of ecological contribution and should not be treated so rigidly, more people have expressed appreciation for the series of measures announced by Nillion: clear standards, transparent rules, and a focus on long-term value, Nillion is exploring a new standard for the operation of the crypto community.
Currently, Nillion has announced the economic model of $NIL, as the native token of the ecosystem, the $NIL token has functions such as paying for computing and storage fees, incentivizing validators, and may also become an important governance tool for the ecosystem in the future.
The total supply of the $NIL token is 1 billion, with an initial circulation of 19.52% (approximately 195.15 million), with the specific distribution rules as follows:
Ecosystem and R&D: 29%
Community: 20%
Protocol development: 10%
Early supporters: 21%
Core contributors: 20%
Image source: Twitter @nillionnetwork
At the same time, the release of the $NIL token will take place on March 24, coinciding with the genesis of Nillion's mainnet, the Alpha mainnet of the blind module, and the community airdrop. At launch, $NIL will be distributed to the community through airdrops and community round participants.
Of course, such "open and honest" airdrop rules have also attracted more attention to Nillion, this star project in the privacy track, with more people wanting to learn more:
What exactly is Nillion's decentralized blind computing network? How does it differ from other privacy solutions?
Focusing on high-value data, building super privacy tools: delving into Nillion's blind computing network
In simple terms, Nillion's goal can be summarized in one sentence: to store, transmit, and process high-value data in a fully encrypted state.
This sentence can be broken down into two parts:
First: high-value data.
The high-value data that Nillion focuses on refers to highly sensitive privacy data that is extremely valuable to organizations or individuals, which can significantly impact users' lives, such as personal medical genetic data. The leakage of this data can often lead to severe consequences for the data owner, necessitating a stronger security defense. Moreover, achieving "data usable but invisible" can further unlock more valuable application scenarios and build a fairer data ecosystem.
Second: storage, transmission, and processing in a fully encrypted state.
Many privacy solutions aim to achieve the storage, transmission, and processing of data in a fully encrypted state. Currently popular blockchain privacy technologies include Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK), Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE).
Nillion aims to build a blind computing network where users do not need to trust anyone; nodes can collaborate to compute data, but they cannot see the plaintext data locally and are unaware of the input data or output results.
So, what is "blind computing"?
It is actually a broad concept that encompasses various technologies and methods that can "perform computations without exposing input data." It is a product of the integration and development of multiple cryptographic and secure computing technologies.
In our country's reform and opening-up, there is a well-known slogan: "It doesn't matter if it's a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice, it's a good cat."
Nillion's blind computing philosophy has much in common with this saying:
Different privacy computing methods have their unique advantages and applicable scenarios, but they also face their own dilemmas. For example, MPC often encounters communication complexity, FHE struggles with computational overhead, and TEE is criticized for its trusted foundation. A single solution often faces computational complexity and performance limitations, making it difficult to balance efficiency, security, and scalability, and many times cannot meet diverse privacy scenarios.
Therefore, Nillion is committed to building a flexible and efficient development environment that aggregates all privacy technologies: facing different needs in various scenarios, developers do not need to understand the specific information of privacy technologies. The Nillion compiler will help select the best combination of privacy technologies, thus enabling developers to easily build applications with privacy features.
In this "blind computing network," Nillion adopts a parallel dual-layer architecture design of Petnet and NilChain:
NilChain acts as the "scheduling center" and "incentive center" for the entire network operation:
NilChain is built on the Cosmos SDK and is mainly responsible for node management, task scheduling, inter-cluster coordination, and payment settlement. At the same time, NilChain supports IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol) to achieve interoperability with other blockchains. For example, NilChain records the staking and reputation of nodes, allocates computing tasks to suitable Petnet node clusters, and handles user payments and node rewards.
Petnet is primarily responsible for data storage and computation, consisting of a distributed node network.
As the orchestration layer, the implementation of Petnet's functions relies on two key components:
Compiler: Simplifies the use of privacy technologies by providing different levels of abstraction.
Computing Network: Executes secure computations and manages encrypted data.
Image source: Nillion Doc
Petnet integrates various privacy technologies, including ZK, MPC, FHE, and TEE, all of which run in its independent blind modules as core components executing specific functions. At the same time, Nillion has introduced a series of practical tools to further lower the privacy threshold and enhance the development experience.
The MPC protocol Curl is based on the Linear Secret Sharing Scheme (LSSS) and excels in efficiently handling complex computations, making it very suitable for solving real-world problems, such as supporting the development of privacy-preserving AI agents.
The privacy technology suite nilAI includes multiple modules such as AIVM, nada-AI, and nilTEE, focusing on supporting the development of privacy AI.
The virtual machine nilVM allows developers to compile programs using the Nada compiler and then upload the compiled programs to run on the Nillion Network. Nada is Nillion's Python-based open-source domain-specific language (DSL) and is developed using the Nillion Software Development Kit (SDK), which includes several components such as nada-AI, nada-numpy, and nada-test, significantly lowering the barriers to building privacy applications.
The encrypted distributed NoSQL database nilDB is designed for the storage and computation of privacy-protecting data, capable of distributing encrypted data as Secret shares across multiple nodes to eliminate reliance on a central authority. Additionally, data owners can authorize others to run SQL-like queries, computations, and privacy-preserving aggregations on the stored data.
When faced with complex privacy computing needs, Petnet internally organizes nodes into clusters based on different requirements to execute specific tasks. Each cluster can be viewed as an independent blind computing unit, providing data sharding processing across multiple nodes.
Through data sharding technology, data is broken down into smaller fragments distributed across different nodes, preventing any single node from accessing the complete dataset. Furthermore, by introducing privacy technologies such as MPC, multiple nodes can perform joint computations without disclosing private data while reducing communication between nodes, significantly enhancing security, performance, efficiency, and scalability.
As a blockchain equipped with super privacy tools, the Nillion ecosystem has already taken shape during the testnet phase. The Nillion blind computing network has further confirmed its technical feasibility through in-depth cooperation with various projects. With the arrival of the airdrop in March 2025 and the official launch of the mainnet, the next round of growth for the Nillion ecosystem has become a focal point for many.
Countdown to the mainnet launch, a preview of Nillion's rich ecological projects in privacy scenarios
As a highly anticipated privacy + data + AI project, Nillion has made very solid preparations for the initial appearance of the mainnet during the past eight months of the testnet phase:
Nillion has undergone over 200 investor conference calls, two successful testnet iterations, more than 50 social media podcast activities, and published over 10,000 tweets, establishing connections with over 300 developers and 178 apps, aiming to further build a developer-friendly environment while establishing close ties with the ecosystem and community.
In the previously launched validator program, validators will ensure the data integrity of the entire network and play a key role in maintaining security and launching the mainnet. The program, which ended on December 11, 2024, attracted over 500,000 validators who collectively processed approximately 195 million keys and ensured the security of about 1,050 GB of data.
Image source: Twitter @nillionnetwork
Through the ecological overview released by Nillion, we can also see the initial scale of Nillion's ecological landscape. Currently, Nillion has reached cooperation with over 50 projects, including Aptos, Near, Arbitrum, Mantle, Virtuals, and Fractal, covering multiple sectors such as DeFi, AI, DeSci, public chains, and DAOs.
In the current trend of AI flourishing in Web2 and Web3, Nillion's blind computing philosophy has a natural compatibility with AI development:
Data serves as the fuel for AI development. By protecting user data, promoting data sharing, optimizing model training, fulfilling ethical responsibilities, and driving technological innovation, the Nillion blind computing network will provide comprehensive support for the sustainable development of AI.
Currently, AI is indeed an important sector of the Nillion ecosystem, with more than ten AI projects enhancing privacy through collaboration with Nillion.
Virtuals Protocol, as the largest multimodal AI agent protocol and framework, established cooperation with Nillion in June 2024. By utilizing Nillion's secure computing infrastructure, it supports the private training and inference of AI models, ensuring that user private information is protected during interactions between users and AI agents, and sensitive conversations and data are not leaked.
Additionally, Nillion's ecological AI projects include the decentralized open AI infrastructure network Ritual and the AI agent protocol Crush AI.
Nillion focuses on high-value data, including financial investment data and personal medical data, which also provides opportunities for Nillion's development in DeFi and DeSci.
In the DeFi sector, the powerful privacy features brought by Nillion not only protect user data and asset security but will also play an important role in identity compliance, financial innovation, and personalized financial services. Kayra is a very typical case.
As a decentralized dark pool exchange, Kayra is based on order book multi-party computation (MPC) technology, aiming to provide a privacy-protecting trading experience. It is currently operating on Aleo, Ethereum Sepolia, and Nillion testnets, dedicated to providing users with a secure and private trading environment.
In the DeSci (Decentralized Science) field, the healthcare sector is undoubtedly one of the most promising application scenarios.
Traditional medical research often faces a prominent challenge: researchers need access to a large and diverse set of data to assess and analyze health conditions, but most people are reluctant to share their health data due to privacy concerns. This not only limits the sample size but also slows down the research process.
Nillion's privacy computing solution provides an innovative answer to this problem: through its technology, researchers can analyze health data without disclosing personal information, thus eliminating trust issues in data sharing.
Currently, this technical feature of Nillion has attracted the attention and cooperation of several healthcare projects:
Space of Mind is a platform focused on providing affordable peer support for individuals experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Through Nillion, the platform achieves privacy and security management of patient data, ensuring that user information is not misused.
Monadic DNA focuses on the security and privacy of personal genomic data, aiming to help users own and manage their genetic information, avoiding the data leakage risks associated with traditional methods. By utilizing Nillion's blind computing technology, users can safely process data and generate DNA passports after uploading their raw DNA files, while ensuring that data privacy is not violated.
AgeRate is an online platform dedicated to helping people achieve healthier and longer lives. Users only need to collect a small blood sample and send it back to receive health scores and personalized recommendations. By collaborating with Nillion, AgeRate ensures that user privacy is not leaked while allowing users to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their health status.
In addition, Nillion's ecological landscape extends to consumer-level application scenarios such as social networking and DAOs:
For example, Aloha is an AI-driven dating application designed to help users authentically present themselves and efficiently find suitable matches. By integrating Nillion's blind computing technology, Aloha ensures the security of user data and reduces the risk of data breaches.
Image source: Twitter @nillionnetwork
The diverse ecosystem not only showcases the high demand for privacy among multiple projects in various niche markets and their recognition of Nillion's privacy solutions but also promises to provide users with a rich exploration experience right from the launch of the mainnet.
With the official launch of the Nillion mainnet in March 2025, its ecological collaborations will further accelerate, bringing innovative experiences of privacy and security to more users.
Conclusion
In the future, with the official launch of the mainnet and the initiation of the TGE, more of Nillion's roadmap plans will soon be realized.
According to the roadmap disclosed by its officials, in the first phase of project development, Nillion will focus on launching the mainnet, followed by coordinating and optimizing the blind computing modules to achieve an early launch of the general computing layer to support a wider range of application scenarios.
In the second phase, Nillion's key work will focus on launching the validator program to ensure the security and reliability of the network, continuously enhancing the degree of decentralization while actively promoting integration with other blockchain projects or ecosystems.
By the third phase, Nillion will center on auditing and certification mechanisms to continuously enhance the credibility and transparency of the network. In the final fourth phase, Nillion will focus on expanding the scale of the ecosystem, aiming to achieve permissionless network expansion, support more users and applications, and launch ecosystem exploration plans to promote the implementation of more innovative applications.
Image source: Twitter @nillionnetwork
As a privacy project supported by senior executives from Uber and leading VCs, we see Nillion's foresight in product design, ecosystem expansion, and community building from its past performance.
Through the end-to-end encrypted storage, transmission, and processing of high-value data, Nillion aims to build the next generation of privacy infrastructure and is committed to promoting safe, efficient, and rapid development across multiple fields, including AI, DeFi, and DeSci.
The handling of the airdrop controversy and the CMO's detailed response to community questions and introduction of airdrop rules have also strengthened the community's confidence in the project's long-term healthy development.
In an era where privacy and data value are equally important, privacy projects like Nillion will become a significant force driving the prosperity of the Web3 ecosystem. As Nillion's mainnet officially launches and enters a new phase of ecological development, we look forward to Nillion being an important force in the wave of Web3 development, accelerating the arrival of the privacy era.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
